Uptown Saturday Night

Patty and Jeannie Score Some Crack

"What you doing, girl?" shouts someone from across the street, near the corner of Winona and Kenmore.

"Girl, we're on this mission," answers Jeannie.

It's around seven on a Saturday night and 23-year-old Jeannie and her friend Patty are out to score some crack cocaine.

"The first thing to look for is starter jackets, you know, with the names of sports teams on them," says Patty. "You find a kid in a starter jacket, like with Raiders on the back, and chances are you found some coke."

Jeannie and Patty walk the ten blocks up Kenmore from Winona to Thorndale. It's cold out but all they're wearing is light sweaters.

By 10:45 Jeannie and Patty have finally found some "good shit." They find a hallway and hunker down to smoke their pipes.

Thanks to the efforts of Father George Clements and Father Pfleger, the sale of cocaine paraphernalia is illegal, so Jeannie and Patty have taken an El Producto cigar tube, which is made of glass, and cracked the closed end open. The pipe's screen is fashioned from a Chore Boy-brand kitchen scrubbing pad.

"Chore Boy must be rich by now, all the drug addicts that use it," says Jeannie through puffs of cocaine smoke.

"Yeah," says Patty. "I must have given them at least $1,000 of my money since I started smoking." Patty's been smoking crack for three years, Jeannie for six.

The drugs are taking effect, and though the radiator in the hallway is just inches from the wall Jeannie is trying to crawl behind it.

It's midnight before Patty can drag Jeannie out from her hiding spot, and now that they're both "geeked," or coming down off their high, they're desperate to find more crack. Their eyes bulge from their sockets, seeming ready to pop out. By the time Patty turns a couple of tricks most of the drug dealers who stand along Kenmore between Granville and Thorndale have gone home, so the search must begin anew.

"Before that bust in Addison, we used to didn't have to look like this," says Jeannie. "Crack was everywhere. Now it's so hard to find."

"Yeah, sometimes this looking makes me want to quit," says Patty.

Both Patty and Jeannie have run through drug rehab programs like Ben Johnson beat Carl Lewis--fast and still under the influence.

It's 4:30 AM and Jeannie and Patty have made it all the way to Wilson and Sheridan.